Science and technology

Dropbox

There's room yet in the cloud

GOOGLE'S commitment to cloud computing has forced Microsoft to unclench its desktop hold, Apple to join in (somewhat slowly and in meagre ways), Yahoo! to flail, and legions of other firms to follow suit, Facebook key among them. But there's an opening in the cloud: simple online storage that looks and acts like a hard drive. (Google lets you store up to a gigabyte at no cost on Google Docs but requires its web interface to manage access.)

That may explain the several million users of Dropbox, a startup service which gives away more storage than Google, up to two gigabytes. Dropbox offers a magic folder on your desktop that looks and acts the same as any other, except for this: it's being watched. Move items into the folder, create new folders, open and modify documents, and a tiny piece of Dropbox monitoring software replicates those actions on every other computer to which you've linked your account. The company also stores a copy of the file for access from the Web, and archives older revisions for ready retrieval. This back-up capability can be ignored; it requires no scheduling or configuration. Dropbox restrains size and bandwidth by storing differences in updated files. And there's another bit of magic that's helped Dropbox go viral: any folder in your Dropbox directory can be shared with other parties, and any changes are immediately synced for both parties.

Dropbox said in February it had 4m users, and the firm's sales and marketing head, Adam Gross, said it had added "millions more" in the interim, now storing over 20 billion files occupying petabytes (a thousand terabytes) of storage at Amazon's S3 on-demand storage system (and other places). User growth has accelerated since the release in May of a set of guidelines for other software makers to tie directly into a user's Dropbox account, similar to the approach that aided Twitter's growth and ubiquity.

The service is useful for coordinating files among desktops, but a boon for mobile devices, which lack access to a file system. Dropbox, in turn, benefits from the expansion of mobile devices with 3G connections. On Apple's mobile iOS, apps like 1Password (for secure password and note storage), Documents To Go (Microsoft Office editing) and GoodReader (document retrieval and viewing) all reach directly into Dropbox storage. Apple doesn't give software makers an over-the-air tool for keeping items up to date, so Dropbox is a drop-in replacement for tedious Wi-Fi synchronization. A new simple text editor for the iPhone and iPad, Elements, offers paper-thin layer between a user and Dropbox; its developer, Justin Williams, was in turn inspired by cloud-based Dropbox sync he found in 1Password.

And it's not just the techies who love it. Susan Orlean, a staff writer at the New Yorker, uses Dropbox to sync, among other things, a manuscript of a book she's writing about Rin Tin Tin. From an email,

I love Dropbox. The appeal is its utter simplicity -- it's essentially invisible, doing the task that isn't hard but none of us care to remember to do, namely, backing up our files. It's also been the perfect way for me to move between my office computer, my home computer, my iPhone, and my iPad, and I've even accessed things via the web when I've been away from all my millions of devices.

I had a hard-drive meltdown this summer, and even though I broke into a cold sweat, I really hadn't lost anything because I had been working on those files within Dropbox. The hard drive and my whole computer, for that matter, was just a piece of metal and plastic that I replaced. Disaster averted.

Dropbox can't hold its niche forever. Google could flip a switch and give all its Docs users virtual hard-drives at a moment's notice. And other startups, notably SugarSync, offer more features and compete on pricing. But Mr Gross doesn't see Google and other cloud firms as competitors. Dropbox, he believes, has a slice of a rapidly growing pie. Rather, he and his colleagues are fighting the entrenched client-and-server model that pervades remote access. "We're competing," he says, "with Windows 3.1."

@feralrom: MobileMe's iDisk offers a form of syncing, but uses a quite different approach. You cannot share synced folders with other MobileMe users; older versions of files are not stored; and there are other differences.

Fundamentally, iDisk is a mounted Internet volume, which you treat like a hard drive. Dropbox, SugarSync, and similar systems look and act like folders with no management involved of the moving pieces.

I have had MobileMe for years. Once I went Dropbox, nothing else compares. I work from multiple devices. Dell at work, iMac at home, Macbook Pro for long travel, iPad for short travel, iPhone, all my files, all the time. Also, the shared folders great. I work for big Med Device company, lot's of need for file sharing/collaboration. Dropbox has been best and cheapest solution ever! It has also saved me on more than a few occasions when I need earlier version of file. Even if google offered this, I would not switch. These guys got it right the first time. Seamless. No worries, EVER. My hard drive in the cloud. I just wish they had 500 GB option!

This has been done before, except not in a general way. The previous version was marketed (but not technically restricted) to sharing music files. All that is needed to resurrect Napster is for enough people to adopt a convention that a shared Dropbox folder with a certain name will be where they put the music files they're willing to share with others. The only real difference is that Napster was a pre-cloud app that expected the files to reside on users computers and only get transferred as needed. Placing those "shared" files in the cloud somewhere would eliminate duplication and save on bandwidth, rather like TOR does.

Sometimes the simplest ideas spawn the most interesting offshoot ("www" for example) whereas the fancy apps are lucky to even get adopted by their originally-targeted users. At present, cloud computing is pretty much restricted to big companies and dedicated cloud apps that store the data in proprietary locations. An unrestricted publicly-available universal data storage location seems like an excellent way to break that lock and open the door to yet another new class of applications.

I have been a user for about a year and have yet to face a significant problem with the software: encryption takes place on the user PC, downloads and uploads are fast and I can open several sessions at once (office and multiple home PCs for example).
I think they claim to have a million users.

I am sure there must be other applications out there that I don't know about, hooked up to salesforce or other cloud apps for storage service provision.

I have used Dropbox from the beginning and love it. I do IT work and have setup a couple of company with Dropbox shared folders as a replacement for a file server. They all love it and it has worked great. Everyone always has a local copy for when they travel and all changes are updated as soon as they get online again. Its truly the perfect solution for anyone that uses more than one computer or needs to share files with co-workers.

If you like dropbox and have an iOS device you should try Droptext. Very similar to Elements but cheaper and has more features.

I'll put in a plug for Ubuntu's 'Ubuntu One' service, which works just like Dropbox, and comes with 2GB for free with an Ubuntu install (which is also free). It works great, backing up and sharing all files in a certain folder for any computer you are on, anywhere you're connected to the net.

I ditched MobileMe for a hodgepodge of different services, and didn't look back. Not for financial reasons, but because MobileMe's services, in almost every case, are inferior to the alternatives.

So, having used both MobileMe and Dropbox, I can tell you that Dropbox is vastly better than iDisk. iDisk, of course, is a legendarily bad performer, causing data loss, crashing, and getting stuck in sync cycles. I'll skip past that.

First, Apple's *official* line is that you're not supposed to work off of iDisk, if you have the files synced locally. That is, even if you keep a locally-synced iDisk, you run into problems if you try to edit a file directly on iDisk. Microsoft Word freaks out, for instance. Their support staff will tell you to copy files off of iDisk, edit them, and then copy them back.

Those times when iDisk does manage to sync correctly, iDisk often gets documents out of sync with each other anyway, causing you to lose data. If you complain about this, you'll be told to just not use the local sync feature--that is, to mount your iDisk as a network drive. (The network drive approach is fundamentally flawed, of course, especially with mobile devices that may or may not have a network connection.) I think this sync loss happens because iDisk doesn't monitor for file changes as effectively as Dropbox.

When it comes to locally syncing your files, iDisk has a design flaw inn that it creates a disk image (a "sparse bundle," really) that you mount as a drive, which then syncs. This oddly cumbersome approach makes it impossible to use iDisk with many backup tools, such as Time Machine. Whileas I can roll back my Dropbox with Time Machine quite easily, like I could with any other folder, with iDisk, you can only restore the entire disk image as it existing at a previous time.

Dropbox's folder-based approach works so much better--and the little checkbox it adds to a file's icon indicating "yes, this one has synced" really helps your piece of mind. Plus, it works exactly the same way on OS X, Windows, and Linux.

DropBox is by far the best if you need both backup and sync service. I suspect the reason for DropBox's popularity is its superior design. Its a wonderfully easy, simple, beautiful experience all the way through -- very Apple-like. Just tried out SugarSync which does the same thing but is not the same -- not even close. It appears to be created without any user-centered principles in mind. The one feature DropBox lacks is the ability to sync individual folders -- may not be a biggie to most, but nice to have.

@Rardac: There are lots of different kinds of security concerns. Interception of your data. Access to your data by crackers and criminals. Access to your data by company employees who should not have such.

Dropbox uses a variety of intelligent methods to secure transactions: all data is sent via SSL and secured on its servers with AES-256. The firm has a list of such measures.

Of course, one relies not just on statements, but the trust that the clever list of measures are being enacted in robust ways.

When researching online backup services (those devoted to hosting your backup in the cloud, as opposed to syncing it), I found that many used a key you generated and only you possessed to lock backed-up blocks or files at your system before being hosted on the remote machine.

Be Warned! I use Dropbox and love it but to call it a backup service is a misnomer. Dropbox immediately synchronizes all changes (including corruption and mistaken deletes) and only with an add-on, paid option does it store prior versions of files. If you delete a file by mistake or overwrite half of your manuscript and realize this several weeks later you are simply out of luck which is why Dropbox should not be considered backup software.

Security-wise, the dropbox team claims their software is secure but admits they do have access to all of your data (their administrators, not their ordinary support staff) and like any other software product that runs locally, has access some access to your PC. When I checked, they did not have a chief security officer, someone to review the security of the code they wrote, or automated tools to find common security errors made by programmers; from what I understand they have never had an external review or audit of their security practices. Dropbox is likely on-par security-wise with most other consumer-software but unfortunately that's not much of a hurdle.